Along with the usual bug fixes, Opera's team claims a 50 percent performance boost in JavaScript, CSS, and other page loading dynamics. We haven't had the time to put Opera 10.6 alpha through our usual tests, but the Download Squad blog's benchmarks put Opera 10.6 over even Chrome's bleeding-edge Dev version.

Taskbar tab previews have been disabled by default in this release, as Windows 7 users with lots of tabs open were seeing serious slowdown. The look and feel of the menu button, Speed Dial, and in-browser tab previews were also updated, and a few other items of note round out this early release. You can grab it for Windows, Mac, or Linux systems, and if you do, we want to know what you think in the comments.